The so-called Kyoto School, which already spans three generations, began in 1912 when Kitaro was called to the philosophical faculty of what was then the Imperial University of Kyoto. owed this call to the fact that two years previously he had published a book with the title, A Study of Good, in which he made the attempt to express the experiences afforded him in his Zen praxis in the conceptuality of Western thought, especially that of the empirical psychology of William James. During his activity as a teacher at Kyoto University he expanded and deepened the point of departure of his philosophical thinking with the help of Fichte's transcendental philosophy and the intentionalism of the phenomenology of Brentano and Husserl. But only at the time of his retirement from his academic position in 1928 did he succeed in establishing his own philosophy in the form of a logic of the identity of absolute contradictories in the Topos (place) of absolute nothingness. In the form in which he expanded it in the years following, it became what is recognized as Nishida Philosophy and made its author one of the most outstanding philosophers of modernJapan. is not the sole founder of the Kyoto School, however, for from 1918 on he taught concurrently with Tanabe Hajime, his eventual successor, who, unlike Nishida, did not have his roots in Zen Buddhism. Decisive for Tanabe's thinking was, rather, that other great manifestation of the Japanese spiritual world, namely, faith in Amida. Just as this faith became surprisingly influential for shortly before his death in 1945, as is evidenced in his last writings, even in the stormy years preceding the defeat ofJapan-years in which he experienced the collapse of his previous worldview-Tanabe found consolation in unconditional submission to the compassion of Amida, which he afterwards